Tag Archives: omnotron

Last night my Horde 10-man group (go Team Goose!) went into Blackwing Descent and killed Magmaw and Omnotron. It was actually our second week in there, but the first week is something I don’ t want to talk about.

I welcome any and all constructive criticism about my stats for these fights, but remember that raiding as a priest is completely new to me, so please be gentle.

Magmaw was the first boss we did. I was tank healing for this fight.

I used Power Word: Shield and Renew on the tank whenever I could, and used a mix of Penance, Flash Heal, Greater Heal and Binding Heal to keep him topped up. Prayer of Healing was used whenever the raid was getting really low and to help top everyone up while Magmaw’s head was down.

No Pain Suppression or Power Infusion. I seem to have a tendency to forget my cooldowns on this fight. I did use Power Word: Barrier on the raid, which unfortunately doesn’t show up at all in WoL. I see from this that I did not pay enough attention to keeping Prayer of Mending up. It’ s interesting to note that my Corrupted Egg Shell trinket 19950 mana – more than Arcane Torrent or Hymn of Hope. That’s not half bad.

Next we did Omnotron, where I was mainly on raid healing.

I got ranked on WoL for this fight, which tells me that having Disc Priests raid heal is not a popular option. I did a lot of Prayer of Healing, especially when Magmatron was active. I also used Power Word: Shield and Renew a lot on the raid. Penance was used mostly on the tanks whenever it was off cooldown, and to counter Magmatron’s fire beam of death.

Again, my uptime on Prayer of Mending was abysmal. I think I need a giant Power Aura in the middle of my screen that flashes and makes laser beam noises when it’s not up. I did remember to use Power Infusion and Pain Suppression this time.

Things that are awesome about Disc healing:

Managing mana cooldowns is fun. Between Hymn of Hope, Inner Focus, Shadow Fiend, Power Infusion, Corrupted Eggshell trinket, Arcane Torrent, mana pots and yelling at my fiance the druid to Innervate me, I never have a lack of buttons to push. I like pushing buttons.

Things like Pain Suppression, Power Word: Barrier and Power Word: Shield help out the rest of the healers. I know from healing on my druid that having a disc priest in the group makes things much easier for me.

I have almost two dozen different abilities to use on each fight (this goes back to how I like to push buttons). Spell usage varies greatly from fight to fight which prevents things from getting stale.

Things that I don’t like, or need to get used to:

Grace only stacks on one target. I just don’t know how to deal with this. When tank healing I want to keep it on the tank 100% of the time, but I sometimes need to heal other players as well. Wondering whether it’s worth it to cast a direct heal on someone else causes hesitation on my part and I don’t like that.

Divine Hymn. Maybe it’s just because I’m used to how awesome Tranquility is, but I hit Divine Hymn as an emergency heal and it doesn’t save anyone. The healing from it is very disappointing.

Leap of Faith. I’ve never used this for anything but griefing people outside of raids. I can see its uses but the times I’ve had it used on my druid it felt invasive and annoying, so I’m hesitant to use it.

I had my first raid on my Druid this weekend. We did 25-man Blackwing Descent and killed Magmaw and Omnotron.

I found the Magmaw fight fairly straightforward. The biggest problem I had at first was that Magmaw would pull the tank out of range when he picked him up to Mangle. Once that got sorted he went down quickly (though he really liked to smash the melee after picking up the tank).

Here’s my healing breakdown for the kill:

On this fight I kept my Lifeblooms up on our single tank and mostly raid healed until the Mangle happened. The positioning in this fight makes it great for Wild Growth and Efflorescence so I saw some nice numbers from those. Since there’s no damage to heal in phase 2, I was able to be quite free with my mana in phase 1.

I wasn’t very happy with my healing on Magmaw. I made some significant omissions – no Tranquility, no Tree of Life, no Barkskin. Bad Druid. I’m going to attribute that to being a little rusty from not raiding for 2 months. Once we got to Omnotron I got much more comfortable and my healing really improved.

Here are my numbers from the Omnotron kill:

There’s a lot of raid damage (I think that’s going to be a pattern) so Wild Growth and Rejuvenation are my biggest sources of healing. Lifebloom was up on one tank as close to 100% of the time as I could get it. Nourish was my ‘spam when I have nothing better to cast’ heal and I tried to get out a Regrowth on every clearcasting proc. The amount of healing from Living Seed is pretty disappointing. I had been defending it against naysayers because we’re casting so many more direct heals now, but I see now it’s still quite lackluster.

Overall, I’m happy with how druid healing feels in raids. Both my tank and raid healing feel strong (despite what Paragon says) and the challenge of having to think about what spells to cast and make the most of procs (like Clearcasting and Nature’s Grace) is a much appreciated change. The only thing I feel I’m really missing as a druid is a raid-helping cooldown. It’s probably just because I’ve been playing my Disc Priest (who has a ton of them), but I think it’s something druids are lacking. Whether it’s a raid mana helper, a damage reducer or a temporary buff of some kind, I think resto druids could really use one extra ability.